Want to avoid catching a cold? Then don't stay indoors

Traditional advice that suggested getting wet and cold made you more likely to get the sniffles are just old wives' tales, an infectious diseases expert has said.

Professor Peter Collignon, director of Infectious Disease at the Australian National University in Canberra, said the old advice that it was best to stay indoors during low outdoor temperatures was not only wrong but potentially dangerous.

'While people think it's going out in the rain that makes you sick, it's actually the staying indoors,' he said.

Wives' tales: Staying indoors when it is cold and wet outside is more likely to land you with a cold, according to disease experts

'It isn't the weather conditions that make people sick, but how we react to cold temperatures, remaining indoors and spreading infections.

'Those that stay indoors are also getting less vitamin D because they're not getting any sunlight, no matter how slight it might be.'

Toughing it out: Two infectious diseases professors in Australia say people who go outside in cold and wet weather get more vitamin D and are less likely to get a cold (file picture)

Another expert, based at the University of Sydney, recalled an experiment conducted in England many years ago.

Professor David Isaacs told how researchers at the Common Cold Research Unit in Salisbury put volunteers in an outdoor pool in the middle of winter and found they did not catch colds.

'Getting cold doesn't give you a cold,' he said. 'Stress and time of year, because you're crowded indoors, are much more important.'

The two experts made their comments because Sydney is experiencing its coldest start to the Down Under summer in 50 years - with no respite from chilly temperatures and pouring rain for days.

One Sydney mother backed up the researchers' claims.

Miami Hazell said her 11-year-old son Ethan, who suffers from asthma and chronic lung disease, benefitted from being outdoors in the cold and rain.

Another mother, Annette Sage, told the Sydney Morning Herald that when her three children went on family camping holidays they got cold and wet, went swimming in the sea in winter and did not get sick.

'The people that sit at home and clean their houses with disinfectant all the time are the ones that have sick kids' she said.